Tuesday, August 16, 2011

A Fascist Pig!

We have often joked about Assad’s uncanny resemblance to Hitler, but we never really imagined how easy it would be to actually get him to act like Hitler, until now.

Tuesday August 16, 2011

Lattakia goes through a 4th day of shelling as more neighborhoods are targeted and Assad Death Squads conduct house-to-house searches. The 4-day death toll in Lattakia is currently put at 34. Elsewhere in the Lattakia Province, sounds of heavy gunfire were also heard in the coastal city of Jableh, as tanks laid siege to the City. Pro-Assad militias set fire to the town-hall, which is the excuse always by military units to justify their intervention. Hundreds of residents are said to have evacuated the city before the army troops come marching in and the shelling begins.

In Homs, 2 more people died of wounds sustained during the crackdown that took place in Al-Sibaa Neighborhood yesterday.

In Damascus, security forces reinforced their presence in a number of Damascene suburbs, including Al-Zabadani, in an attempt to curtail further mass demonstrations.

The Syrian navy is a pissant, 4th-rate force, incapable of even slowing down any half-decent fleet. A foe would have to be virtually unarmed for Syria’s rusting warships to threaten it. Which means the fleet still does have some purpose for the Assad regime: terrorizing its own people.

The ICG’s latest report on Syria, titled “Popular Protest in North Africa and the Middle East (VII): The Syrian Regime’s Slow-motion Suicide,” relies almost exclusively on the testimony of Syrian regime figures and its Western apologists, dressed up as “independent” sources. The result is a deeply flawed picture of the last five months of Assadist sadism, where a dynastic regime with a proven history of churning out blatant propaganda and committing mass murder and torture is taken as more credible or sincere than its serious and credible opposition movement.

Affecting the outcome in Syria will require a mix of international isolation, economic pressure, and the exacerbation of internal fissures. Within each pillar there are a number of steps -- the withdrawal of Western ambassadors, the formation of an international "contact group" to coordinate policy, the imposition of energy and other economic sanctions, for example -- which can be taken to add to the strong measures which the Obama Administration has already put in place. But the United States must start by ensuring that our own policy -- toward Syria and toward democracy in the Arab world broadly -- is unmistakable.

In revolutions, there rarely exists a middle ground. Turkey’s delicate balancing act between the Syrian people and their oppressor could backfire if its foreign policy does not keep pace with the growing popular revolt next door. A telling sign recently carried by peaceful protestors in the Syrian city of Hama read, “Erdogan: Our disappointment in you is great.”

As a well-known Turkish expression, with a quaint reference to an Egyptian town, goes, "One might lose his rice while trying to take Damietta." In other words, Turkey could lose both the Arab people and their rulers if it bets on the wrong horse.

A sharp discrepancy between Syria's nose-diving economy and its relatively stable currency is fueling speculation among observers that either another country, presumably strategic oil-rich ally Iran, has injected huge amounts of cash into its economy, or Damascus is quickly draining its foreign-currency reserves.

DAMASCUS — Syria announced yesterday it has found a promising gas field in the central governorate of Homs, as Human Rights Watch urged the European Union to freeze the assets of Syria’s state oil and gas companies.

“It’s not going to be any news if the United States says, ‘Assad needs to go.’ Okay, fine, what’s next?” asked Clinton, who spoke before a room packed with service members, academics and journalists. “If Turkey says it, if [Saudi] King Abdullah says it, if other people say it, there is no way the Assad regime can ignore it.”

Years ago, I used to have a monopoly on calling Bashar Al-Assad all different sorts of names, in public, in Syria, as my audience shuddered with fear. Now, it’s a common practice in Syria to call Assad names, I can hardly keep up. But a Fascist Pig seems to be very apt indeed, considering the rhetoric of Assad supporters and the practices of his security officers. We have often joked about Assad’s uncanny resemblance to Hitler, but we never really imagined how easy it would be to actually get him to act like Hitler, until now. But the thing that I cannot forget is that a few short months ago, there were world leaders staking their reputations, and our future, on him being a reformer. The Assads are not the only ones who are cut off from the realities developing on the ground: the entire world seems to be in the same boat. Our revolutions are wakeup calls to the entire world, but they come as a rude awakening of sorts, and some do not take kindly to that. Hence, the denial, the anger, the bloodshed, but so be it. All the sleepers have awakened, and we all have to deal with that.

Syrian banks said to provide forged currency to clients as evident in this video made by employees from a state-run bank. The video shows 2 500-pound bills both dating from 1998 and belonging to the same batch, yet they show marked differences between them, clear evidence of forgery. Still, both bills have been obtained from the same bank and security apparatuses are said to be the main suppliers of these forged notes http://youtu.be/CgzLodn87t0

About the Author

Ammar Abdulhamid is a liberal Syrian pro-democracy activist whose anti-regime activities led to his exile in September of 2005. He currently lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, Khawla Yusuf, and their children, Oula (b.1986) and Mouhanad (b. 1990). He is the founder of the Tharwa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to democracy promotion. His personal website and entries from his older blogs can be accessed here.